The Sun Going Down on the Van

The dust sheets are folded and the tins are in the back, and the lad is standing by the tailgate with his hands in his jacket the way he does when he is trying not to ask.

He is nineteen. He has worked four days this week for a two-man decorating outfit, which is to say for one man and his van, and it is Friday, and Friday is when the man pays him. The man knows this. He also knows that the client on the big job settled up on Wednesday, that the money is in the account, and that if he pays the lad tonight the float he likes to keep for the weekend goes thin. Not empty. Thin.

So he says what he said last Friday and the Friday before. Monday, mate. Waiting on that invoice. And the lad says no bother, because he is nineteen and the man is his boss and he does not know that the invoice was paid two days ago.

The man gets in the van. He watches in the wing mirror while the lad walks toward the bus stop, and he watches him stop, take his hand out of his pocket, and count what is in it. Then he watches him put it back and keep walking, a bit slower.

And the man sits there with the engine off, and here is the exact thing he thinks, because it is the thing you think: it is not stealing. He is going to get it. It is a few days.

That is true. It is also the third Friday in a row that a young man has walked to a bus stop counting coins because of a sentence that was easier to say than the other one. And somewhere on the drive home the man realizes that the money stopped being the heaviest thing he owed the lad about two Fridays ago. What he owes him now is the truth about the invoice, and that debt is not waiting on anybody's payment terms.

You have somebody like that. Not necessarily a lad and not necessarily wages. A sister's share of the headstone from your father's funeral, still sitting with you because bringing it up would mean bringing it all up. The friend who covered the fuel on the trip and has stopped mentioning it, and the not-mentioning is worse than the asking was. The reference you said you would write. The answer you owe somebody about whether you are coming, or staying, or still doing the thing you said you would do. There is a person waiting on something from you, and you have let it wait, and every time you have said a version of Monday, mate.

The two sentences in Proverbs that were written for a van

Let me get the name of this site out of the way first, because I am a woman who keeps clean books and I will not trade on a promise the books do not carry. There is no code. Scripture holds no hidden method for money, no ancient key that opens a flow, and nothing hidden here that would have made the month shorter. If that is what brought you, I am not going to make you feel foolish for looking; the month is longer than the money for a great many honest people. What Scripture does carry about money is older and plainer than a secret, and most of it is about the person standing next to you. This piece is about one of them.

Here is the text, and it is two sentences long, and the Spirit who breathed it has not softened it since:

Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to do it. Do not say to your neighbour, "Go, and come again, tomorrow I will give it," when you have it with you.Proverbs 3:27-28

Read the second sentence again and notice what it does not say. It does not say do not pay him. It does not say cheat him. It names something much smaller and much more ordinary: the sentence that puts a person off until tomorrow when the thing they need is already in your hand. Come back Monday. Waiting on the invoice. I will sort it at the end of the month. That sentence is what Proverbs has in view, and it is a sin against a neighbor, not a scheduling preference.

And it is not alone in the book. Moses told Israel that a hired man's wages were to be paid on his day, before the sun set on them, because he was poor and his life hung on them (Deuteronomy 24:15). Leviticus says the same thing another way: the wages of a hired worker shall not stay with you overnight until the morning. Sundown is the deadline God set, not the end of the month. He set it because He knows exactly what a young man does at a bus stop with his hand in his pocket, and He would not have him do it for one night more than the work took.

Now hear this over yourself, before we go a step further, because I do not want you reading this from underneath it. You are a person God has already made honest in Christ. That is not my assessment of your Fridays; it is what the written Word says about anyone who is in Him, that the old man is put off and the new one is being renewed in the image of the One who made him, and it is the Holy Spirit and not your willpower who is doing the renewing. I am not asking you to become honest tonight. I am telling you that you were made so, and asking you to walk to the van as the person you already are.

Where God stands in the vineyard

Jesus told a story about a landowner who hired men at dawn, at nine, at noon, at three, and at five, and when evening came he said to his manager: call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last (Matthew 20:8). We usually preach that story about grace, and rightly, because the ones who worked an hour got a full day's pay. But look at the small thing in it that nobody preaches. When evening came. Not the end of the week. Not when the harvest was sold. The sun went down and every man was paid, and Jesus put that detail in the mouth of the character who stands for His Father.

That is where God stands. He pays at evening. He is not the one in the story who says come back Monday, and He is not waiting to be pressured into what He owes. When Jesus said give us this day our daily bread, He was teaching us to pray to a Father who deals in days, not in months, and who is not holding anybody's due overnight to keep His own float comfortable.

You have that Father. His word says He is faithful and does not lie, and His Spirit is the one who takes a Father like that and puts the same instinct in His children, so that paying at evening stops being a discipline you enforce on yourself and becomes something you recognize as home. You are being made like Him. That is the whole of it.

And now let me be very careful, because there are two of you reading this and I owe you both the truth today.

If you have it with you, and you know you have it, then Proverbs 3:28 is speaking to you and there is nothing left to think about. The float goes thin. The lad gets paid tonight. The sister gets the transfer before you have finished reading. Tomorrow was never yours to offer, and the relief you feel at having said it, finally, will be out of all proportion to the size of the sum, because it was never the sum that was heavy.

If you genuinely do not have it, if the money is not there and will not be there tonight however you move things, then hear me plainly: you are not a thief, and Scripture never calls you one. Deuteronomy's law was written for the man who could pay and did not, never for the man who could not. What you owe today is a different thing, and it is just as real: the truth, to their face, in words. Not Monday, mate. Something closer to: I cannot pay you tonight, here is exactly why, and here is what I can do. That sentence costs more than money and it is what honest-today actually means when the money is not possible; the Spirit asks it of you and asks nothing more. A person can survive being owed. What wears them down is being managed.